President Biden’s Decline, It’s Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again
By Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
Our only agenda is to present the disturbing reality of what happened in the White House and the Democratic presidential campaign in 2023–2024, as told to us by approximately two hundred people, including lawmakers and White House and campaign insiders, some of whom may never acknowledge speaking to us but all of whom know the truth within these pages. Most of the information laid out in this book was shared with us after the election of 2024, when officials and aides felt considerably freer to talk. There are very few people named herein with whom we didn’t speak.
Our most important sources were Democrats inside and outside the White House who were grappling with how so many of them had been so focused on convincing voters that Donald Trump was a true existential threat to the nation that they put blinders on, participating in a charade that delivered the election directly into Trump’s hands.
Some spoke to us with regret that they hadn’t done more, or that they had waited so long to talk to the press about what was going on behind the scenes. Many were angry and felt deeply betrayed, not just by Biden but by his inner circle of advisers, his allies, and his family. They had seen bad moments behind the scenes but had been assured all was well. And then came the debate.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Author’s Note)
The lessons from this book go beyond one man and one political party. They speak to more universal questions about cognitive dissonance, groupthink, courage, cowardice, and patriotism.
George Orwell once wrote that “we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
He was writing about World War II, but he could have been writing about any time, any era. “The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye,” Orwell went on. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
Here is what was in front of our noses.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Author’s Note)
The elites, the Democratic officials, the media, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama—they shouldn’t have pushed him out of the race. If he had stayed in, he would have beaten Donald Trump. That’s what the polls suggested, he would say again and again.
His pollsters told us that no such polls existed.
There was no credible data, they said, to support the notion that he would have won. All unspun information suggested it would have been a loss, likely a spectacular one, far worse than that suffered by his replacement as Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 1)
While Biden on a day-in, day-out basis could certainly make decisions and assert wisdom and act as president, there were several significant issues that complicated his presidency: a limit to the hours in which he could reliably function and an increasing number of moments where he seemed to freeze up, lose his train of thought, forget the names of top aides, or momentarily not remember friends he’d known for decades. Not to mention impairments to his ability to communicate—ones unrelated to his lifelong stutter.
It wasn’t a straight line of decline; he had good days and bad. But until the last day of his presidency, Joe Biden and those in his innermost circle refused to admit the reality that his energy, cognitive skills, and communication capacity had faltered significantly. Even worse, through various means, they tried to hide it.
The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for reelection—followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment.
And then came the June 27 debate against Trump, when Biden’s decline was laid bare before the world.
It was not just one bad night, as Biden and his team claimed in the aftermath. Millions were shocked by Biden’s unintelligible, slack-jawed performance at the debate, but some Democrats weren’t surprised at all. Though they had seen him like this behind closed doors, they didn’t say anything. For a variety of reasons, they rationalized their silence.
As a result, Democrats stumbled into the fall of 2024 with an untested nominee and growing public mistrust of a White House that had been gaslighting the American people. With only three and a half months to run a campaign against a candidate and machine that had been going pretty much full speed since 2015, Harris was fearful of distancing herself from her boss and publicly unable to acknowledge what the world continued to witness of his decline.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 1)
“It was an abomination,” one prominent Democratic strategist—who publicly defended Biden—told us. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.”
Biden had framed his entire presidency as a pitched battle to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office. By not relinquishing power and being honest with himself and the country about his decline, he guaranteed it.
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Trump ended up winning the Electoral College by 312 to 226 electoral votes, and he secured the popular vote by more than 2.2 million. But the race was closer than those numbers suggest. Harris lost the three key “Blue Wall” states by a total of roughly 230,000 votes. If she had beat the margins of 1.44 percent in Michigan, 1.73 percent in Pennsylvania, and 0.87 percent in Wisconsin, she would be president today.
Ponder the question that Democrats such as Harris and others who might have run in 2024—Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Governor Gavin Newsom of California, Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan—replay in their minds: If Biden had not run for reelection, or if he had acknowledged his decay and changed his mind about it in 2023, what would have happened?
If history is any guide, a competitive primary and caucus process would have produced a stronger Democratic nominee, one who had more experience with debates and taking questions from reporters, one with a more cogent and precise answer as to why they were running, one with time to introduce themselves to the American people. Past flip-flops on issues would have been addressed, policy proposals would have been fleshed out, winning messages would have been formed. The nominee would have figured out a way to respectfully but forcefully distance themselves from the unpopular incumbent president and forge a new path, representing change.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 1)
“If Biden had decided in 2023 to drop out, we would have had a robust primary,” Plouffe said. “Whitmer, Pritzker, Newsom, Buttigieg, Harris, and Klobuchar would have run. Warnock and Shapiro would have kicked the tires of it. Maybe Mark Cuban or a businessperson of some sort. Twenty percent of governors and thirty percent of senators would have thought about it. We would have been eminently stronger.”
Once it became clear to the world that Biden needed to drop out, Obama, former House Speaker Pelosi, and others pushed for some sort of open process in July and August. Biden’s refusal to budge until July 21 and then his immediate endorsement of Harris meant that this, too, fell by the wayside.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 1)
It was 2023. Plouffe had retired from politics and his former boss, Barack Obama, was staying out of it. Biden was still pissed at Obama for not backing his possible presidential run in 2016, implicitly backing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Obama had never directly told Biden not to run, but he had encouraged his VP—still deeply grieving the loss of his son Beau—to focus on himself as a person. Plouffe had cautioned against a run—Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders were way too popular—and Obama political director David Simas had presented Biden with polling that showed the improbability of a victory.
“The president was not encouraging” is how Biden had put it.
Folks in the Obama camp felt that they had spared Biden from a third presidential primary disaster following his 1988 and 2008 failures.
Then they rallied the party around him in 2020 because he had the best chance of beating Trump. He did, and many felt his was a presidency of accomplishment. Reviving the economy after COVID, getting vaccines into arms. A historic infrastructure bill. Boosting semiconductor manufacturing in the US. A bipartisan gun safety package.
In June 2023, Obama popped in on Biden for a visit. He wanted to kick the tires, make sure the old guy was still up to it. Biden seemed fine—old, still Biden, but fine. Obama cautioned that Trump would be a formidable foe because of the increasingly polarized nation, Trump’s entrenched base, and the fractured media landscape.
“Just make sure you can win the race” is all Obama told Biden this time, notwithstanding any doubts.
What could Obama do?
This was Biden’s decision.
He was, after all, the president.
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What the world saw at his one and only 2024 debate was not an anomaly. It was not a cold; it was not someone who was underprepared or overprepared. It was not someone who was just a little tired. It was the natural result of an eighty-one-year-old man whose capabilities had been diminishing for years. Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify an attempt to put an at times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 1)
His 1988 presidential run ended in a plagiarism scandal before 1987 even ended.
A few months later, in February 1988, the headaches he’d been ignoring the previous year resulted in his being rushed to Saint Francis Hospital in Wilmington. His second wife, Jill, was told not to go into his hospital room because he was being given last rites. He had blood in his spinal fluid and a leaking aneurysm below the base of his brain. He was warned that the necessary brain surgery might cause him to lose his ability to speak. Jill pointed out that if he hadn’t withdrawn from the presidential race, he would have been campaigning in New Hampshire at the time his aneurysm began bleeding and he wouldn’t have stopped. “You wouldn’t be alive,” she said. “Things happen for a reason.”
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 2)
In May 2015, Biden’s son Beau died of brain cancer.
It crushed him.
His forty-five-year-old son, Hunter, spiraled into addiction and broke up his family. For the first time in decades, Biden said, he didn’t know his purpose.
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Biden ran again in 2020. Obama didn’t endorse him in the primaries and many in the media doubted him. But he won the nomination and beat Trump.
He saw himself as a man of historic achievements, akin to FDR and LBJ. America was flat on its back, and he saved the economy, he would say. Fifteen million new jobs! Eight hundred thousand in manufacturing! Unemployment under 4 percent for a record two years in a row! Infrastructure projects that would be felt for decades! The critics said it couldn’t be done, Biden would say. The press, the doubters, the elites— none of them ever thought he could do any of it.
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So to think that aging or ailment would make Biden reconsider his run is to not understand Joe Biden and the true believers with whom he surrounded himself. Fate had spent the better part of the last half century throwing everything it could at him, the worst tragedies imaginable.
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To family and close aides, the mythology became almost a theology, a near-religious faith in Biden’s ability to rise again.
And as with any theology, skepticism was forbidden.
As one reporter who has closely covered Biden told us, “Biden literally says, ‘Keep the faith.’ Which means to say, don’t allow yourself to even question it. And it created a strange circle of groupthink where none of them would permit the other ones to demonstrate any doubt.”
Part of that theology is made up of narratives of questionable accuracy. The image of Joe—aviators, ice cream, 1967 Corvette—as avuncular and Jill as warm. These are not universally held impressions among those who know them well.
The president was fond of using the formal family motto, of giving “my word as a Biden,” but they had another, more private saying: “Never call a fat person fat.” It wasn’t just about politesse; it was about ignoring ugly facts.
“Don’t say mean truths” is how someone close to the family put it.
“The Bidens’ greatest strength is living in their own reality,” this person told us. “And Biden himself is gifted at creating it: Beau isn’t going to die. Hunter’s sobriety is stable. Joe always tells the truth. Joe cares more about his family than his own ambition. They stick to the narrative and repeat it.”
From 2020 until 2024, all of this resulted in an almost spiritual refusal to admit that Biden was declining.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 2)
Those close to him say that the first signs he was deteriorating emerged after the death of his beloved son Beau in 2015. Biden often referred to Beau—Joseph Robinette Biden III—as an upgraded version of himself. He was the heir apparent, groomed to be the Biden who would finally become president. An army officer and veteran of the Iraq war, a husband and father, Beau lived a mere mile away from his parents. He had twice been elected Delaware’s attorney general, in 2006 and 2010, and planned to run for governor in 2016. By the end of 2012, Beau had already begun organizing for a potential White House run, hiring a national fundraiser and crisscrossing the country.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 3)
In the summer of 2013, Beau collapsed during a family vacation and underwent brain surgery to remove a tumor. “Beau’s tumor was definitely glioblastoma. Stage IV,” Biden later wrote about the postoperative findings. “It was a death sentence,” Hunter wrote. Beau began limiting his public appearances that fall. He stopped doing extended media interviews. He appeared gaunt. He had a fresh surgical scar on his head and a new haircut with it.
In September, Biden and Beau’s team internally debated how much to disclose about Beau—the vice president’s son and a state’s top law enforcement officer—but ultimately said nothing. In November, Beau told a local reporter that he had been given a “clean bill of health.”
In February, Dr. Wai-Kwan Alfred Yung released a statement to The News Journal that echoed Beau. The attorney general, Yung wrote, had a “clean bill of health” after an exam.
The neurologist told the public that they had removed a “small lesion” from Beau’s brain. In fact, it was a “tumor slightly larger than a golf ball,” Biden later revealed.
Beau would remain the sitting attorney general of Delaware for the entirety of 2014, even as his family secretly flew him all over the country for a variety of experimental treatments. In April 2014, he began having difficulties with his speech. He would often enter hospitals under an alias: George Lincoln.
Beau’s wife, Hallie, told people she didn’t understand why they had to keep his illness a secret. Making it public likely would have led people to rally around the family. He was an elected official. But both Biden and Beau opposed disclosure.
At times, Biden also instructed his team to mislead the media about his whereabouts. They would publicly say that the vice president was going to Delaware for the weekend, then returning to DC the next week. That was technically true, but Biden sometimes flew to Houston, where Beau was receiving treatment, to be with his eldest son over the weekend.
Publicly acknowledging Beau’s illness would make it a reality. It was them against the world.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 3)
In the 2020 campaign, titles meant little. There was technically a campaign manager, a communications director, and deputy campaign managers, but the ultimate decision-makers were a group of seasoned political veterans known internally by any number of nicknames, including “the Politburo”: Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, and the policy wonk Bruce Reed. They’d worked with Biden for many years, if not decades.
There were other close aides. Anita Dunn and her husband, Bob Bauer, joined the team in 2015 to help Biden prepare for a presidential bid, even as most of their colleagues from the Obama administration backed Clinton.
Donilon had been in the center of Democratic politics for decades, shaping dozens of campaigns, beginning in the late 1980s when he worked on the campaign of Douglas Wilder, the first African American ever elected as governor. Something of a loner, he was a man of few words and could be immovable when he had a theory of the case. A former pollster, he now often went with his gut. He had crafted Biden’s messaging for 2020—“a fight for the soul of the nation”—even as the data supporting that approach was fuzzy at best. Donilon’s brothers were also in the national spotlight; one had been a national security adviser for Obama, and the other was the spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Boston. They shared Biden’s Irish Catholic working-class self-image. The president valued Mike Donilon’s advice so much that aides would later joke that if he wanted, he could get Biden to start a war.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 3)
Many top Democrats, including Obama, believed that Sanders, a democratic socialist, could not beat Trump and would hurt Democrats downballot.
After the fading of more moderate candidates, such as former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, Biden became the candidate of last resort for the establishment. At root, politics is a numbers game—Biden could get Black voters in big numbers, and the others couldn’t. Party leaders such as South Carolina Congressman James “Jim” Clyburn threw their support behind Biden just before that state’s primary and propelled him to a commanding win.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 3)
Biden was clinching the nomination, but his communications struggles continued. On March 2, he forgot the words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women are created, by the, you know, you know the thing.”
In April, he struggled to explain his plan for the coronavirus outbreak. “You know, there’s a, uh, during World War II, uh, you know, where Roosevelt came up with a thing, uh, that, uh, you know, was totally different than a, than the, it’s called, he called it the, you know, the World War II, he had the war, the-the war production board,” he said, faltering.
Democrats remained publicly mum; Biden at any age was better than Trump.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 3)
It was terrible to admit, but Biden’s own aides would say that while the COVID-19 pandemic was one of the worst things to happen to the world, it was one of the best things to happen to Biden’s presidential hopes. They doubted Biden could have otherwise kept up the pace of campaigning through November.
As pandemic lockdowns became widespread in March 2020, Biden could avoid that grueling travel and campaign remotely from Wilmington. He could rest. Close aides pushed for events to start in the afternoon, if possible.
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A special team was brought in and told to edit the videos down to make them airable, if only a few minutes’ worth. They had to get creative.
The racial-justice conversation aired the first night for less than five minutes, the health-care exchange on the second night for under four.
Edited, the videos likely appeared fine to viewers, Biden no worse than any other senior on Zoom. But two of the Democrats who were involved in the films’ production together were dumbfounded.
“I didn’t think he could be president,” the second Democrat said. After what they’d seen, they couldn’t understand how Biden could be capable of doing the job. “This was when some top Democrats entered an angry phase. I became disillusioned with the entire apparatus. Because what I was seeing on this video in 2020—that means people working for him every day see this.”
From a distance of four years, the second Democrat reached a harsh conclusion about the team around Biden: “They’ve been gaslighting us.”
Two other top Democrats thought the first two overstated the case, that the footage was lousy because the Zoom experience was awkward.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 3)
Rob Flaherty, who served as digital director for the presidential campaign of former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke, joined the Biden campaign in December 2019. By then already aware of Biden’s occasional verbal stumbles, he observed how quickly Republicans clipped any such moment —real or imagined, fair or unfair.
It is always tough to push back on misinformation, Flaherty knew. He also understood that for every unfair and bogus clip, there were real ones. The campaign convened a focus group to determine the best way to fight those videos. By blasting a targeted audience with images of Biden looking stronger and assertive, the campaign quelled doubts about his age, sowing new ones about the validity of the viral clips.
But the bogus videos were tough to counter because the underlying preexisting belief they reaffirmed—that Biden seemed old and prone to misspeaking—was true.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 3)
A complication for anyone struggling to discern the president’s acuity as he aged was the Bidenness of it all. Since the 1970s, he’d had a reputation for being hot-tempered to staff and not remembering their names. He was known on the Hill for being congenitally prone to long stories, gaffes, and inappropriate comments.
“You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent,” he told an Indian American during his 2008 run.
In 2007, he called his primary opponent, Barack Obama, “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
“I didn’t take it personally, and I don’t think he intended to offend,” Obama told The New York Times. “But the way he constructed the statement was probably a little unfortunate.”
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 4)
Being close to the president on a daily basis made it even more difficult to recognize the extent of his dotage. White House and campaign officials referred to “boiling frog syndrome,” an allegory about a frog placed in tepid water brought ever so slowly to a boil so that the frog doesn’t perceive the change until it’s too late.
The president’s deterioration, the argument goes, was less discernible to those who saw him consistently and up close than to those who saw him only occasionally. Reporters, donors, and Democratic lawmakers who met with him only intermittently were increasingly alarmed, while top aides dismissively tossed out a “He’s fine.”
After the 2024 debate, one top adviser was stunned when he viewed side-by-side clips of Biden during a 2020 debate and Biden during the calamity of June 27, 2024.
But many of these same aides and advisers made accommodations to help the aging president appear at his best, becoming accomplices— knowingly or not—in what would be, by 2024, a cover-up.
It’s worth noting that boiling frog syndrome is apocryphal. When scientists tried to replicate the parable in real life, their research subjects leaped out of the pot.
Confronted with unfortunate realities, people with proximity to the president had much more complicated decisions to make than did the frogs.
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The chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Washington Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, was skeptical that moderates would vote for the Build Back Better Act if they weren’t forced to do so. The night before Biden came to the Hill, she told Klain that they didn’t have the progressive votes for infrastructure without the two bills directly linked.
Those who disagreed with this strategy thought that the progressives were essentially hostage-taking and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Pelosi supported the Build Back Better Act, but she was also openeyed about the fact that there wasn’t enough support for it in the Senate to become law. She needed Biden to call for the entire House Democratic Caucus to unite behind the infrastructure bill, take the win, and then work on Build Back Better.
Biden spoke for roughly thirty minutes. It was a long, digressive speech. He quoted legendary Black Negro League then–Major League pitcher Satchel Paige, who had played into his fifties: “How old would you be if you did not know how old you were?” One House Democrat called Biden’s remarks “incomprehensible.”
And he left without making the ask.
Many House Democrats were confused. Progressives took it as a sign that Biden was with them. Years later, other House Democrats would see in the president’s flawed presentation evidence of perhaps some communicative, if not cognitive, slippage.
Pelosi saw it as strategy—Klain’s strategy. She admired Klain but knew he also liked being considered a hero by the Progressive Caucus. She didn’t like to be surprised, and she had been surprised.
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Some pundits had mocked Biden for promising to govern in a bipartisan way, and yet nineteen Senate Republicans, including Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, voted for the bill. To offset the progressive nos, Pelosi got the bill passed in the House with thirteen Republicans.
“Monday was an unambiguous victory for the central promise of Biden’s presidential campaign: to lower the temperature in Washington and find places of common ground,” Alex wrote at the time.
As Alex noted in an article for Politico, after the win, Biden indulged himself by reading a dossier of twenty-seven articles and cable news tickers that said his agenda was in trouble. dems struggle on way forward as biden agenda stalls, blared one chyron. biden’s agenda stalled as he begins 8- day foreign trip, proclaimed another.
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To millions of Americans, however, the most lasting memory of Biden’s first year in office was the calamitous US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August.
The president ended the war, as promised, but thirteen US servicemembers and hundreds of Afghans were killed in the chaos as the Taliban recaptured power. He never communicated adequate regret, never fired anyone, and would react defensively when the issue was brought up. The topic could easily trigger his temper at his own aides.
His approval ratings sank into the low forties, then by the following summer the thirties, and never recovered.
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“Why didn’t anyone stop that?” the First Lady asked, chastising senior White House staff.
On the eve of Biden’s first full year in office—January 19, 2022—the president had given a press conference.
It lasted nearly two hours. And long after he had crossed off every reporter on the list provided by his communications office, he went rogue, calling on James Rosen from the conservative TV channel Newsmax.
“Why do you suppose such large segments of the American electorate have come to harbor such profound concerns about your cognitive fitness?” Rosen asked.
“I have no idea,” Biden said.
Staffers slipped him a piece of paper telling him to wrap it up, but he kept going.
Afterward, Biden, Klain, Communications Director Kate Bedingfield, and Press Secretary Jen Psaki went with the president into the Treaty Room to chat.
That was when the First Lady appeared at the door and blasted the staff for letting that go on for so long. The truth was, it was all Biden—some of his aides suspected he had done it precisely to show the American electorate whom Rosen had asked about that they were wrong.
“Where were you guys?” the First Lady asked, as if the president wasn’t sitting right there.
The confrontation exemplified part of a larger change that aides had noticed in Jill Biden since 2016, when she was Second Lady.
In the past, she had been a reluctant political spouse. When Biden was considering running for president in 2003, she walked through a planning meeting in a bathing suit with no scrawled on her stomach. As Biden weighed a run in 2015 after Beau’s death, she was overwhelmed by grief and couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for the idea.
After Trump won in 2016, aides noticed that she began saying yes to political events more often. By 2019, she was on board with Biden’s bid for the presidency. She became a political partner in addition to a spouse. She saw herself first and foremost as his defender.
It was a reversal of roles for the two most influential women in Biden’s life.
Jill and Biden’s sister, Valerie “Val” Biden Owens, had always had a tense dynamic, each feeling that she held Biden’s best interests at heart. Val had been campaign manager for all her brother’s campaigns since 1972. She never had doubts about any of them until 2020. She wrote that she “didn’t want the family to go through it. I was worried the family couldn’t go through it. I worried about Hunter. The grandkids. And Joe.”
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Beau and Hunter were tight, but there was an heir-and-the-spare dynamic at play. Beau was the chosen one while Hunter struggled to figure out his place and could not keep his addictions at bay. After Beau died in 2015, Hunter tried to fill the void. He told others he would run for mayor of Wilmington. He would pick up the family mantle; Biden supported him. It could help soothe the pain from the loss of Beau.
Instead, Hunter spiraled more wildly than ever before. In the four years after Beau’s death, Hunter had gone through a bitter divorce, fathered a child he didn’t want to acknowledge, shuffled in and out of rehab facilities, experimented with sobriety methods including yoga retreats and ingesting toad secretions, and carried on a made-for-tabloids affair with his recently deceased brother’s widow in which he introduced her to crack cocaine.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 5)
Hunter had also caused a rift between the Bidens and the Obamas.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s White House relationship began with typical tensions between a president and vice president, with slights both real and perceived. At Obama’s first press conference as president, he was asked to respond to an errant comment that Biden had made. “I don’t remember exactly what Joe was referring to—not surprisingly,” he quipped, drawing laughter from reporters.
The relationship grew warmer over time. Obama’s daughters and Biden’s granddaughters went to school together. Obama delivered a moving eulogy for Beau and draped a Presidential Medal of Freedom around the vice president’s neck. Their respective aides sniped at one another, but Obama and Biden had developed a bond.
The relationship took a more dysfunctional turn in 2015. Michelle Obama had become close with Hunter’s then-wife, Kathleen Buhle. As Hunter began to spiral into addiction and infidelity, Michelle stood in solidarity with her friend, while the Bidens reflexively rallied around Hunter. When salacious details about Kathleen’s divorce filing hit Page Six in early 2017, Biden was angrier at Kathleen for the details having been made public than he was at Hunter for his sleazy behavior. The Bidens slowly began exiling Hunter’s estranged wife. And Michelle privately resented them for doing so.
That put Obama in an awkward position.
When he went to Biden-related events, he would usually go solo. In the fall of 2017, he attended a fundraiser in Wilmington for the Beau Biden Foundation, a children’s advocacy group founded after Beau’s death. Hunter also attended this event and appeared high or inebriated. He got into an argument with Biden’s sister, Val, backstage and then left the fundraiser early. “Weird shit,” Obama told someone soon after. (His office later denied it.)
In 2020, Obama began coordinating with the Biden team early on, while Michelle resisted campaigning. She didn’t like politicking, but her feelings toward the Bidens were also a factor. Democrats had to privately argue that the stakes were too high for her to sit things out. She compromised by focusing on the nonpartisan voter registration group she’d formed in 2018 to avoid partisan politics. Her relatively light campaigning schedule didn’t attract much notice, given the ongoing pandemic, but the Bidens noticed. On the staff level, the resentment ran even deeper.
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Some tried to find workarounds to speed up the process. They would make the decision binary or sneak smaller items into the daily presidential brief in hopes that Biden would just say yes.
In practice, Bruce Reed was the real domestic policy adviser, Mike Donilon was the actual political director, Steve Ricchetti controlled Legislative Affairs, and Klain controlled a bit of everything.
He’s nearly eighty, he knows what he wants, and we know how to handle him—that was the message sent internally.
All of these factors led to a uniquely small and loyal inner circle. Some felt that the insularity was the Politburo’s way of protecting its influence. “Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board,” said one person familiar with the internal dynamic. A cabinet secretary expressed a similar sentiment about the Politburo. “I’ve never seen a situation like this before, with so few people having so much power. They would make huge economic decisions without calling [Treasury] Secretary Yellen.”
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 5)
On November 19—the day before the president’s seventy-ninth birthday— the White House released the results of Biden’s health examination by White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor.
The assessment was perhaps more notable for what it didn’t include than for what it did: There was no mention of a cognitive exam. That seemed odd to physicians who were paying attention.
Many consider it standard practice to begin performing such tests when a patient turns sixty-five, even if they aren’t showing symptoms. Several of the tests can be done in about ten to fifteen minutes. They do not provide conclusive diagnoses; rather, they are a tool for early detection.
It seemed appropriate to perform a cognitive test on a seventy-eightyear-old man—especially one who was starting to show flashes of memory loss, especially one who was president of the United States.
In 2017, when then-President Trump was seventy-one, Democrats in Congress introduced resolutions and legislation essentially pushing Trump to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, given his erratic behavior.
In early 2018, the White House physician gave Trump a short cognitive test called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), which can be used to detect early signs of dementia. Trump and his doctor—now a Republican member of Congress since 2021—claimed he aced it. The same Democrats who had earnestly voiced concerns about Trump were conspicuously silent about Biden’s not taking a cognitive exam in 2021 despite obvious moments of mental slippage.
O’Connor told people that the ten-minute test was for physicians who saw their patients only occasionally, and he constantly saw the president. When others suggested doing the test to make sure that Biden was capable of being president, O’Connor would sometimes point to the Oval Office and say, “Biden’s already being president.” He’d add that people may not like how Biden was doing the job, but that was different than being incapable.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 5)
Biden was old and had a shuffle, so O’Connor arranged for a neurological exam to see if his physical movements signaled a deeper disorder, such as Parkinson’s. (Cognitive tests, by contrast, are about testing memory, language skills, and other functions.)
“There were no findings which would be consistent with any cerebellar or other central neurological disorder, such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s or ascending lateral sclerosis,” O’Connor wrote.
Still, some doctors speculated that the only reason to perform a neurological test but not a cognitive one was if you feared the results.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 5)
He wasn’t naive to the stresses of the presidency, and he privately expressed worry about the toll it was taking. He fought other Biden officials on scheduling to try to get Biden more rest.
O’Connor quipped that Biden’s staff were trying to kill him, while O’Connor was trying to keep him alive. And no one had to look too hard around Washington in 2021 to see political figures whose decline was much more noticeable than Biden’s.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 5)
In July 2024, Congresswoman Kay Granger, the first Republican woman to represent Texas in the House, cast her last vote in Congress at eightyone years old and was then secretly placed in an assisted-living facility for patients with dementia. She (or her family) continued to collect her congressional paycheck; her constituents were not officially informed, and members of Congress who knew about it kept quiet.
Covering for an aging politician is commonplace in modern Washington, a town that has a long, gruesome record of powerful seniors trying to obscure their obvious infirmities—with the complicity of their colleagues, families, and staffs, who have turned a blind eye to these crises.
This context is not excusable, but it is part of the background of the Biden story.
After Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell suffered his second moment of seeming to freeze up, or glitch, while speaking publicly in August 2023, former GOP Governor Nikki Haley said: “The Senate is the most privileged nursing home in the country…. You have to know when to leave.”
A life of power, fame, and relevance is not easy to give up. As four-time California Governor Jerry Brown bluntly put it to a Los Angeles TV newsman when reflecting on Biden’s decision to not drop out sooner: “Politics is addictive. It’s exciting. It’s a kind of psychic cocaine…. People don’t want to just go back to their former boring lives.” Unlike athletics or entertainment or business, there are no coaches or producers or boards of directors to intervene—politicians are truly accountable only to their voters, who can be snookered.
There may be no world in which this toxic dysfunction is as tolerated— and consequential—as politics. South Carolina Republican Senator Strom Thurmond was perhaps the most notorious example. Thurmond served in the Senate from 1954 until retiring a few months before his death, in 2003 —at age one hundred. The senior-most Republican senator since 1989, Thurmond was for many years the GOP’s president pro tempore of the Senate—typically the senior member of the majority party, third in line to the presidency after only the vice president and the Speaker of the House. Beginning in the 1990s, it was a blatant lie, perpetuated by Senators from both major parties, that Thurmond was up to the task at hand.
In 1996, seven years before his death, Thurmond was, at ninety-three, referring to the Mexicans who attacked the Alamo as “Russians.” Many who met him questioned his basic competence and cognition.
Progress in Washington, DC, on this front came when women senators were able to age into protected incoherence as well.
In November 2020, Senator Dianne Feinstein, an eighty-seven-year-old California Democrat, asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey the same question twice in a row at a public hearing. During that period, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, tried several times to encourage Feinstein to retire on her own terms, but she never did. She even seemed to forget that the conversations had happened.
Michigan Congressman John Conyers, Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran, West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd—the list of addled lawmakers, former and current, goes on and on. Why? Welcome to a system where power is distributed by seniority. And where spouses, children, staffers, and lobbyists invest deeply in the life and success of an individual politician, then grow reluctant to give it all up.
Presidents have been trying to hide or downplay politically problematic health challenges since the beginning of America. In George Washington’s first years in office, he became so sick that it affected his eyesight and hearing. After Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke in September 1919, his doctor, wife, and secretary maneuvered for over a year to conceal the damage from everyone, including his own cabinet.
Even in the glare of the television age, Republican and Democratic presidents alike have hidden the truth, and there’s no law or oversight forcing them to be transparent. Newly elected president, John F. Kennedy in 1960 told a reporter that he did not suffer from Addison’s disease—a lie. As the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded, Kennedy was taking many drugs to help manage his various ailments. We still don’t know when Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s truly began.
The Biden cover-up may not be unique, but it is arguably the most consequential.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 6)
Two months later, on a swing through Asia, Biden said something that appeared at odds with a long-standing US policy known as “strategic ambiguity”—essentially, trying to keep the government of China confused as to whether the US commitment to Taiwan, which China considers part of its territory, includes US military intervention.
Speaking alongside Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the Akasaka Palace in Tokyo, Biden was asked: “You didn’t want to get involved in the Ukraine conflict militarily for obvious reasons. Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?”
“Yes,” Biden said.
“You are?” the reporter responded, surprised.
“That’s the commitment we made,” Biden said. His top advisers tried hard to hold their poker faces, as if he hadn’t said anything newsworthy.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 7)
Senior White House officials admitted that the president’s age was obviously part of the considerations, but there weren’t discussions of “he’s too old to do this trip; it’s more that the Saudi piece was complicated.”
As Baker noted in his story, this was just one of many accommodations that the White House made for the aging president. Biden had given only 38 interviews at that point in his presidency, compared with 116 for Trump, 198 for Obama, 71 for Bush, and 75 for Clinton. By July, Biden had held only 16 press conferences—fewer than half as many as Bush, Obama, and Trump each held at the same point in their presidencies, and fewer than a third as many as Clinton held. Biden had once been one of the easiest quotes for Beltway reporters, and now he was being hidden away.
As Senior White House officials acknowledged to us, the first reason for this was that, yes, the president had lost a step in his communication abilities since his vice presidency. “Before Beau died, he was one hundred percent sharper,” said one senior Biden White House official. “Beau’s death wrecked him. Part of him died that never came back after Beau died. Was he the same guy he was in 2009? Of course not.”
The second reason, of course, was the Bidenness.
The third was the president’s obsessive need to prep for either interviews or press conferences, a demand for data and time and details. “He would demand hours and hours and hours of prep for one interview,” a second senior White House official said. “You had to blow up the schedule for half a day…. Often, the feeling was ‘We don’t have time for this.’ ”
The fourth, said the first official, was “a strategic sense that the media landscape was dramatically different, and there was a lot of discussion about whether there was enough benefit to a long sit-down.” Newspapers and TV news shows simply didn’t reach the same massive audiences they had a decade before. So when it came to press conferences or interviews with legacy media outlets, “we were not going to get what we needed out of it, and so we weren’t going to do it.”
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 7)
When Biden was struggling, he often reverted to his go-to lines, like wanting to “build the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down.”
His speechwriters then tried to graft versions of Biden’s catalog onto whatever issue they were talking about.
White House officials didn’t order them to do it; rather, the speechwriters noticed what worked better. Their job was to make Biden successful. But they were also slowly adapting to Biden’s diminished capabilities.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 7)
Others in his administration were noticing it, however. As he struggled to communicate, his aides and allies noted that he began to increasingly rely on teleprompters and note cards. This even held true for private discussions, such as cabinet meetings.
Before these meetings, White House staff called the various departments and agencies to figure out what they were going to ask the president so that answers could be prepared. The conversations were largely scripted, even after the press had left the room.
Some cabinet secretaries felt that, in fact, Biden relied on the cards more heavily when reporters were absent.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 7)
David Axelrod, a former White House adviser to President Obama, was not getting used to it. On the contrary, he was growing increasingly worried about what he was seeing from afar.
He and the president had a history. Axelrod and David Plouffe were the last two Obama campaign advisers to meet with Biden before then-Senator Obama picked him as running mate. On a private plane, they hopped from state to state to meet with the final three possibles: Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, and Biden, who had run for president against Obama and dropped out after Iowa.
One of the campaign discussions about picking Biden went like this, Axelrod recalled: “Well, he’s sixty-five years old, so he’s certainly not going to run for president at seventy-three. So he’ll be focused on the business at hand.”
“I guess we were right,” Axelrod would later joke, “because he didn’t run until he was seventy-seven.”
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 7)
During one of the low points of Biden’s campaign, Axelrod attended a New Hampshire town hall. Biden’s remarks were not particularly stirring, but a line of voters formed afterward. Each one wanted to talk to him, most with sad stories, seeking a kind ear. And Biden stood and greeted every single one of them.
Like the pilgrimages to Lourdes, Axelrod later said.
And, ultimately, he pulled it off. He won the nomination, then the presidency.
But by 2022, Axelrod had come to fear that Biden was going to discard his previous pledge to be a bridge and a transitional president. He shouldn’t run for reelection, Axelrod thought, and he should make the decision with enough time for the bench of potential Democratic all-stars to suit up and get in the game.
Primaries are important. Primaries are how parties sort things out. How voters learn who candidates really are and see how they perform under pressure. Obama would not have become president if he hadn’t had two years to run and prove his mettle.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 7)
Klain thought that too many strategists underestimated how difficult it was to beat Trump. The GOP had run a stellar field against him in 2016, and all of them had gotten their asses kicked. Same with Hillary Clinton. The idea that beating Trump was easy, that if you took away Joe Biden, anyone else could win, was sloppy thinking.
But for Axelrod, this wasn’t political; it was actuarial. Biden was old— he looked it, seemed it. And the problem was only getting worse.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 7)
In 2017, the Bidens bought a luxurious, contemporary six-bedroom, fiveand-a-half-bath beach home with four fireplaces, an elevator, and ocean views in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
On June 18, 2022, Biden was riding his bike on a trail near the home when he spotted some reporters. He hollered, “Good morning!” Then, while stopping to greet a crowd that had gathered to wish him a happy Father’s Day, he fell off the bike in front of the cameras. Apparently, he’d been unable to dislodge one of his feet from the pedals’ toe cages.
The images were blasted around the world and went viral on social media.
Some inside the White House pushed for there to be recognition that this bike fall was going to impact how the world saw Biden, but senior aides dismissed these concerns.
On a regular basis, the White House would internally distribute a progressive pollster’s “word cloud analytics” illustration of the specific words that voters used when answering open-ended poll questions about the president.
Two weeks after the fall, the bike incident filled the balloon like an ad for Schwinn.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 7)
For more than a year, Biden had been privately telling allies he intended to run for reelection, but before the midterms, in conversation with other staff, Ron Klain raised the question of whether the president should—because of his age and high disapproval ratings—announce he wasn’t. His ratings would go up and buoy Democrats on the ballot. They were just brainstorming messages, but it was on the table.
But the 2022 midterms ended up being not as bad for Democrats as many had predicted. The “red wave” was more of a splash. Democrats even picked up a Senate seat, and though they lost the House, the GOP only saw a net gain of ten seats. Klain was now 100 percent on board with Biden 2024.
At the White House on election eve, staff had gathered for a party in the Roosevelt Room to watch the results and dine on pizza and salad. As the results became more promising, Biden himself walked into the room with a blue sweater and a ball cap on. He sat down and watched the TV with some staff. To people in the room, he didn’t look surprised—he looked vindicated. Told ya so. Biden and his aides felt he had a special relationship with the everyday people that elites just didn’t get.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 7)
A week after the midterms, Trump announced he was going to run for president in a meandering and subdued speech. That made Biden and his team even more confident. Trump was an existential threat, but he looked politically weak. The court cases against him were brewing. Throughout 2023, Biden and Mike Donilon expressed confidence that Trump would wind up in prison.
But the warning signs were there. An early November 2022 Ipsos poll had the president’s approval rating at a low 39 percent, with 57 percent disapproving. Two-thirds of the public surveyed, or 66 percent, thought the country was on the wrong track. When Ipsos ran a poll after the election, a full 68 percent of those surveyed said Biden might not be up for the challenge of running in 2024, and almost half of Democrats, 46 percent, agreed.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 7)
What was notable about the reelection decision-making process is how little of a process there actually was. There were limited conversations about pros and cons among the staffers—the Politburo, Anita Dunn, and Jen O’Malley Dillon, who had served as Biden’s 2020 campaign manager and now worked as a deputy chief of staff for the White House.
But to the surprise of some senior staff, there was no formal meeting between them and the president to hash it out, no real discussion about the risks of running for reelection at eighty-one or whether he could do the job at eighty-six.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 7)
“You don’t run for four years—you run for eight,” Anthony Bernal would tell others, giving voice to the First Lady. He’d often bring up different trips or projects they would do “in the second term.” He had already begun planning the First Lady’s 2025 international travel schedule.
Whenever the idea of Kamala Harris running came up, Bernal and others senior staffers reacted dismissively. Please. She can’t win.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 7)
During the 2020 campaign, Biden’s team was divided on his pick for running mate. What started out as a list of eleven “equal finalists” behind the scenes came down to two: Harris and Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan.
Biden thought Whitmer had a “Scranton Joe” vibe and cared about making sure that the Democrats remained the party of working people. She prided herself on bringing people together and not holding grudges. Like Biden, she often quoted her dad’s bits of homespun wisdom. Biden’s heart was with Whitmer—she represented the next generation of Biden Democrats.
But Harris made the most sense on paper. Her 2020 campaign had been a train wreck—she dropped out in 2019—but she’d already been vetted on the national stage. Whitmer had only been elected governor in 2018.
Biden had long seen Harris as the likeliest pick. She had been friends with Beau when they both served as state attorneys general, and she had experience.
Biden had already pledged to pick a woman, but by the summer, many of Biden’s top aides and confidants, including Ron Klain, Louisiana Congressman Cedric Richmond, and South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn, were pushing Biden to pick a Black woman. The murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement influenced the politics of the decision. Black Americans, particularly Black women, were the beating heart of the Democratic Party, and they had been key to Biden’s clinching of the nomination.
Richmond joked to Biden that he could pick whomever he wanted, but if he didn’t pick a Black woman, Richmond was going to have to go into the federal witness protection program. Public speculation had the three finalists as Harris, California Congresswoman Karen Bass, and Florida Congresswoman Val Demings.
But, in truth, it came down to Harris or Whitmer.
Klain pushed for Harris, a senator from the most populous state in the country and a former attorney general. He also thought it would demonstrate grace because Harris had hit him hard in the first primary debate in June 2019 when she went after him for working, in the 1970s, with segregationist senators and opposing Department of Education– mandated busing to integrate public schools. “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools,” Harris had said. “And she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
Jill particularly resented the attack. But Harris was the politically pragmatic pick, and beating Trump was too important to let feelings get in the way.
Still, Biden’s advisers did not fully trust her. Harris and her advisers felt it. Her aides got the impression that doing more than the bare minimum to help her was considered an act of disloyalty to Biden. Some of that culture carried over into the White House.
Given Biden’s age, Harris’s team thought that building the vice president up should have been a priority, but many on the Biden team didn’t agree.
Harris aides began dividing Biden advisers between the helpful and what one called “the cabal of the unhelpful.” Bernal, the First Lady’s office, and O’Malley Dillon, along with many in the political and communications shops, were often in the latter group.
Harris sensed the Biden team’s distrust and wanted to avoid giving them any reason to question her loyalty. She even tried to deploy her husband, Doug Emhoff, to try some rapprochement with Jill that later included going to a spinning class at SoulCycle together, but the chill never fully thawed.
To the Biden team, Harris was a regular headache. She often shied away from politically tough assignments when Biden had accepted such assignments as vice president. She even turned down seemingly simple asks, such as headlining DC’s Gridiron Club dinner.
She had considerable turnover, as her aides tired of what they called her “prosecuting the staff” style. And her cautious nature could reach the point of parody.
In April 2022 Harris attended a salon-style dinner with journalists and other socialites at the home of David Bradley—an influential DC news mogul. Harris aides were always anxious about an event going poorly, and before this dinner they held a mock soiree with staff acting the part of guests. Aides weighed having wine served so Harris could practice with a glass or two but ultimately decided not to.
Biden aides noted that the politically safe ground of the National Space Council appeared difficult for Harris. The vice president’s aides internally mixed up astrology and astronomy, then drew mocking public headlines by using child actors for a video about space.
Many on the Biden team felt that Harris didn’t put in the work and was also just not a very nice person. Several quietly expressed buyer’s remorse: They should have picked Whitmer.
In the eyes of Harris’s team, the Biden White House was setting her up to fail. They gave her assignments her team considered politically toxic, such as dealing with the migration crisis, rarely offered to help, and knifed her to reporters along the way. Harris’s camp didn’t understand the hostility and the reluctance to offer her opportunities to shine.
But Biden was not likely to back any other candidate as his successor. He had fumed for years about how Obama hadn’t backed him in 2016; he wouldn’t do the same thing to his vice president.
Still, he had beaten Trump, and he wasn’t confident that she could. He privately called her a “work in progress.”
It became an additional rationalization for his reelection run: There was no plan B.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 7)
In the final weeks of the 2020 election, Biden and his campaign had enlisted national security experts who risked their own credibility to discredit Hunter’s laptop as Russian disinformation.
It was not.
Biden aides realized they wouldn’t be able to do that in 2024; prosecutors from Biden’s Justice Department were using the very real, very scandalous evidence in their investigations.
While the White House refused to acknowledge the authenticity of Hunter’s laptop, Biden’s team quietly had the DNC obtain a copy of the hard drive. The campaign needed to be politically prepared, and Biden needed to be personally prepared.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 7)
It was a situation unique in the history of the republic: Two candidates who both claimed to be running again for the sake of protecting the country from the other also had very real reason to run for the purpose of protecting themselves.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 7)
The numbers were undeniable. From January 1, 2023, to April 27, Biden had only four public events before 10:00 a.m., twelve full weekends with no public events, and only twelve public events after 6:00 p.m., most of which were off camera.
“The White House is basically hiding Biden as he auditions for another term,” Alex wrote.
The White House denied the story. Jen O’Malley Dillon gave a one-word statement: “False.”
The White House press team publicly labeled Alex a peddler of fake news.
Most White Houses deny damaging but true stories and try to undermine reporters they don’t like. Many reporters took the White House denials at face value. Few other outlets outside conservative media followed the story.
In June, The New York Times built on Axios’s analysis of how age had limited Biden’s schedule. Noting that neither Obama nor Biden were early birds, the paper observed that “Mr. Obama was twice as likely to do public events after 6 p.m. compared with Mr. Biden.”
The White House responded to any question about Biden’s age by pointing to Trump’s wild and seemingly unhinged behavior on the campaign trail. But Trump’s limitations didn’t mean that Biden’s deserved less scrutiny. Biden was the sitting president, and he was struggling to not only keep a robust schedule but also articulate his thoughts in public and private.
Some Biden aides were in denial, but others knew that the president might not last through another four years and made peace with it. Beating Trump mattered more.
“He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years—he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while,” said one longtime Biden aide. His aides could pick up the slack. “When you vote for somebody, you are voting for the people around them too,” the aide argued.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 9)
When they recorded videos, much of the footage was unusable. “The man could not speak,” said one person involved. It wasn’t his stutter; it was his inability to find words, to remember what he was saying, to stay on one train of thought. Aides would sometimes make the videos in slow motion to blur the reality of how slowly he actually walked. Every shoot was anxietyinducing for Biden’s team. If he was off, editing footage in a way that cast him in the best light would require hours of work.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 9)
Biden had trouble pronouncing the names of world leaders, so staff began writing “President / Prime Minister of X country” rather than writing out the names of the leaders.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 9)
On June 20, 2023, Biden attended a fundraiser with Governor Gavin Newsom in Kentfield, California, that went awry. He casually called Chinese President Xi Jinping a dictator, sparking outrage in China just after Secretary of State Blinken had flown to Beijing to cool down tensions. And attendees were shaken by Biden’s meandering remarks. The contrast with the younger, agile Newsom didn’t help.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 9)
At an August fundraiser, a former longtime aide who was helping to work the event reacted with surprise when Biden didn’t recognize them. A Biden aide quickly jumped in to remind the president: “You remember [soand-so], right?” Minutes later, Biden seemed to snap back and recall who they were.
But no one went public. One donor who witnessed it all explained their tortured calculus: “We weren’t going to change that he was running, and no one wanted to be on the outside in case he did win. So no one said anything. No one wanted to hear it, and if you said anything, you got your head chopped off.”
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 9)
Attorney General Merrick Garland saw himself as trying to be fair, despite any number of probes that were politically fraught, including those focused on Hunter. The Justice Department had ongoing investigations into not only Trump’s handling of classified documents but also his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Once Trump became a second-time candidate for president in November 2022, Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith to handle the Trump investigations so as to avoid any real or perceived conflicts of interest.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 9)
The FBI told him to hand over all his devices—anything he had used to write the book or record Biden. He did. FBI technicians recovered a trove of files and sent them to Hur’s team, who went to their office’s SCIF—the sensitive compartmented information facility—to listen to them.
The first tape Hur listened to featured Biden talking to Zwonitzer and his sister Val, saying, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”
It was recorded in McLean, Virginia, in 2017. When Biden was no longer vice president.
To Hur, Biden was clearly acknowledging that he knowingly possessed classified materials. Discussing them with others.
On tape.
The moment was something like the twitching gauge of The New York Times’s Needle, that infamous digital prognosticator that displays real-time estimates of election outcomes. The needle had been hovering on one side —any prosecutor would have been unlikely to bring criminal charges against Biden based solely on finding classified documents in his possession.
Then the prosecutors heard the tape: “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”
Suddenly, the needle shot in the other direction.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 9)
Would there be one juror unconvinced that this elderly man knew exactly what he was doing? After all, his cognitive capacity seemed to have been failing him in 2017. State of mind—mens rea—would be crucial. However much political operatives tried to hide this enfeeblement from the public, any defense attorney would want a jury to see as much of it as possible.
Given how Biden presented on these tapes, Hur and his team thought it would be tough to get a unanimous jury to conclude that he knew what he was doing was illegal and that he intended to break the law.
Hur raised the issue with his team, encouraging everyone to discuss the matter openly and forcefully. Dissent was welcome.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 9)
One tame example: a text from Biden campaign operative Brooke Goren to Democratic operatives: “Wanted to flag this story we’d love your help doing some pushback on, if you’re up for it,” she wrote, highlighting a relatively straightforward New York Times story by Michael D. Shear, who had more than fifteen years of experience writing about the health of presidential candidates and presidents.
Goren also asked recipients to amplify a tweet from Eric Schultz, Obama’s onetime deputy press secretary, who criticized the editors at The Times, saying that they “cannot help themselves.”
The goal was to shame journalists and create a disincentive structure for those curious about the president’s condition.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 9)
Even mentioning Biden’s age in the lead of a brief story on his COVID infection resulted in a White House official screaming at Shear, demanding that The Times remove his age because it wasn’t “relevant.”
For Shear, the Biden team’s handling of that story, and all the others the paper wrote about the president’s age and health, basically amounted to one thing: a complete denial that the issue even existed. Every conversation with a Biden official went like this: “He’s exactly the same person he always was. Age is not an issue. He’s incredibly sharp in meetings. There are no accommodations being made for him because of his age.”
Those answers were not true.
Shortly after 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday, September 20, 2023, for example, Shear was among the small “pool” of White House reporters permitted to attend a Biden fundraiser at the Manhattan home of Cary Fowler and Amy Goldman Fowler. Before a crowd of roughly two dozen donors, Biden stumbled through remarks, reading from note cards.
He referred to the January 6 insurrection as happening on January 8 and had some trouble making basic arguments. But the biggest shock came when he told his campaign origin story.
He wasn’t planning on running for president after the Obama administration, he said, “but then along came, in August of 2017, Charlottesville, Virginia. You remember those folks walking out of the fields literally carrying torches, with Nazi swastikas, holding them forward, singing the same vicious, antisemitic bile—the same exact bile—bile that was sung in—in Germany in the early ’30s. And a young woman was killed. A young woman was killed.”
Then, Biden said, he heard Trump’s response: “You also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” Biden told the donors, “And I mean this sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, that’s when I decided I—I was going to run again.” Next, Biden went through a story about his family meeting to discuss whether he should run. And after describing some of that conversation, he said, “You know, you may remember that, you know, those folks from Charlottesville, as they came out of the fields and carrying those swastikas, and remember the ones with the torches and the Ku— accompanied by the Ku Klux Klan. And in addition to that, they had—there were white supremacists. Anyway, they were making the big case about how terrible this was. And a young woman was killed in the process.”
Biden then noted, “My predecessor, as I said, was asked what he thought. He said, ‘There are some very fine people on both sides.’ Well, that kept ringing in my head. And so I couldn’t, quite frankly, remain silent any longer. So I decided I would run.”
The president had just told the exact same story three minutes earlier.
The room, Shear noticed, was stone-cold silent.
Two days later, when the White House press secretary was asked about the president repeating the same story mere minutes apart, Karine JeanPierre said, “The president was making very clear why he decided to run.” She added that “he was speaking from his heart” and doing so “in an incredibly passionate way.”
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 9)
The situation was tabloid fodder but relevant because of how much it suggests a family dynamic built around rejection of reality, one steered at times by Hunter, whose judgment and motivations were hardly solid.
He told his parents not to acknowledge her. When the First Lady wrote a children’s book in 2020 about her husband, she dedicated it to six grandchildren, naming each one and excluding Navy. During Christmas season in 2021 and 2022, Jill hung six stockings for every grandchild— except Navy.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 9)
The interview was alarming. Biden forgot words, trailed off in the middle of thoughts. His answers would jump around. Tales would ramble, then end abruptly, and he would rely on “anyway” and “all kidding aside” to try to end the stories when he lost his train of thought.
Asked if he had brought classified material from the West Wing or the Naval Observatory to the Greenville home, the president pointedly joked about the FBI spending ninety-nine hours there with 375 people searching the place, then noted, “I’m teasing you.”
“You left everything in place,” Biden said. “I just hope you didn’t find any risqué pictures of my wife in a bathing suit. Which you probably did. She’s beautiful. But all kidding aside, I have a library, and the library has a —two filing cabinets in it, and it has built into the walls—when I built that home, built into the walls, a space for a copy machine, for a—what do you call it when they send these—”
“Fax machine,” Siskel broke in, quickly supplying the term that Biden couldn’t find.
“Fax machine,” the president echoed.
Some of his files, he said, contained speeches. “I just warn you all, never make one great eulogy, because you get asked to do everybody’s eulogy,” he added, to laughter. “You think I’m kidding? I’m not. How many people you know did—eulogize Teddy and Strom Thurmond? You know. Anyway, all kidding aside.”
Departing senators could purchase their chairs, Biden noted—his was in that library. Then he was describing the house he had purchased in Delaware. Then he was detailing the rental in Virginia and “the desk I had as a lawyer. The first big case I won, I went out and bought a beautiful desk and credenza. You guys may have done something similar. And I have that in there, a couch and book shelving and a television in there. And there is a file cabinet in there, plus the file cabinets on the credenza behind that open with two big file drawers.”
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 9)
“And by the way,” Biden went on, “there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period, except the president. I’m not—and not a mean thing to say. He just thought that she had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did. And so I hadn’t, I hadn’t, at this point—even though I’m at Penn, I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I’d be running for president. And, and so what was happening, though—what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May thirtieth.”
“2015,” Cotton clarified for him.
“Was it 2015 he had died?” Biden asked.
“It was May of 2015,” Biden was reminded.
“It was 2015,” Biden said.
“Or I’m not sure the month, sir, but I think that was the year,” Bauer said.
“And Trump gets elected in November of 2017?” Biden asked.
“2016,” he was reminded.
Though Hur had not even remotely raised it, Biden was now on the topic of Beau’s tragic death, and he was off and running.
“Beau was like my right arm and Hunt was my left,” he said. “These guys were a year and a day apart, and they could finish each other’s sentences, and Beau—I used to go home on the train, and in the period that I was still in the Senate—anyway.” After an indiscernible utterance, he continued: “There was pressure—not pressure. Beau knew how much I adored him, and I know this sounds—maybe this sounds so—everybody knew how close we were. There was not anybody in the world who wondered whether or not—anyway.”
Hur was growing concerned for the president, who seemed confused and had landed on an emotional topic. He felt bad for him.
“Sir, I’m wondering if this is a good time to take a break briefly,” Hur suggested. “Would that be—”
“No, I—let me just keep going to get it done,” Biden said. “Anyway, here’s the deal. Beau—I used to go home when Beau was at—from Penn, I used to go home on the train on Fridays, and always Jill and I would go—as the crow flies, Beau and his family lived a mile from where we lived in Delaware.”
And then he was off on a six-minute story about the promise that Beau, as he was dying, insisted his father make to him, and the horrific white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, and a Biden family meeting, and on and on.
None of it had anything to do with the question about the house on Chain Bridge Road.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 9)
Throughout 2022, William “Bill” Daley, a former chief of staff to Obama and Clinton Commerce Secretary, watched Biden on TV and got a sinking feeling. He’d known Biden for forty years—he had been the political director of Biden’s 1988 campaign—and was stunned by how much his old friend and colleague seemed to be deteriorating. He knew Biden as a feisty, energetic senator, then vice president, full of piss and vinegar. He hardly recognized the guy on TV. There was no way this was going to work, he would tell friends.
In 2023, he made some calls to see if any heavy hitters were thinking about running against Biden in the Democratic primaries. Having been around politics forever, Daley felt strongly that the notion that Biden would be up to the task the following year was unsustainable. If they waited too long, the inevitable moment when Biden bowed out would saddle the Democratic Party with Vice President Harris as the nominee, and she was even less popular than Biden.
Neither California Governor Gavin Newsom nor Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear was willing to take the plunge. Daley also reached out through an emissary to his own governor, JB Pritzker.
They all said no. Others had advised them that doing so would make them pariahs; when and if Biden lost, they would be blamed.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 9)
In 2020, 34 percent of voters had thought Biden too old to be president. In 2023, that figure shot up to 71 percent. In 2020, 45 percent of voters had thought that Biden lacked the mental sharpness to be president. In 2023, that percentage grew to 62 percent.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 9)
Biden was burnishing an image for himself as the voice of discredited Washington institutions, as someone who just didn’t know what was going on. Trump was out there saying that the world had spun out of control and this guy was not in command, and Axelrod could see that to a lot of people, it was a very powerful argument.
Axelrod wondered if maybe the Biden family could be encouraged to have a serious chat with the president about what he was truly capable of doing as he prepared to turn eighty-one.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 9)
Throughout 2023, as the president’s speaking and walking skills seemed to visibly decline, it was clear to Phillips that Biden’s communication problems likely indicated some cognitive issues. It was also clear that his fellow Democratic officials were in deep denial about this. “People will talk their way into beliefs,” Phillips would later say. “Even O. J. believed he didn’t do it at the end.”
When Phillips pressed them, some Democrats would offer what the congressman called the “yes, but.” As in: “Yes, Biden is in decline, but can you imagine Trump winning?”
Yes, Phillips could imagine Trump winning, especially if Biden were the Democratic nominee.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 10)
Back in 2016, when Bernie Sanders would complain about the extent to which the process was rigged, with the DNC making it difficult to challenge Hillary Clinton, Phillips thought he was just being a sore loser. When Marianne Williamson, another outsider Democratic candidate, would complain about being shut out of the process in 2020, Phillips would deride her. But now he came to see what they had meant.
The previous year, in 2022, leaders of the Democratic Party hadn’t even been sure that Biden was going to run for reelection. In the final months of 2022, the DNC started asking if it needed to prepare for a primary, which would mean setting up debates and figuring out the primary system. When the committee approached the White House, Jen O’Malley Dillon made clear that no further conversations were needed. Biden was running.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 10)
Biden framed his decision as about lifting underrepresented Black voices and suggested that anyone who questioned it—including Phillips—was undermining Black voters, even racist. That claim was undercut by the fact that he called for the calendar change to be for only one presidential cycle —the one he was running in—and the calendar would be revisited in 2028. Internally at the White House and the DNC, aides privately admitted that the main motivation was helping Joe Biden, not uplifting Black voters. The DNC also made clear that there would be no party-sanctioned debates, challengers notwithstanding. It was machine-style politics to ensure that Biden would be the nominee, even as millions of Democratic voters were making plain their serious concerns about his ability to do the job. Most Democratic would-be rivals were deterred. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson challenged Biden but struggled to gain traction.
The Democratic Party of Wisconsin and its chair, Ben Wikler, refused to recognize Phillips as a candidate. Phillips had to sue all the way up to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled that he should be included on the ballot.
Phillips would tell people that he ran to force a debate with the president. A debate, he maintained, would expose to the world that this man—while decent and a good president in the past—could not compete for the highest office in the land. He was not up for another term.
But Phillips could not get Biden on a stage to prove his point. And the entire Democratic Party apparatus went along with it.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 10)
None of the possible credible candidates—neither Newsom nor Whitmer, Pritzker nor Klobuchar—challenged the president.
Carter was weak, so Kennedy challenged him, Donilon would say. H. W. was weak, so Buchanan challenged him. Biden was not weak.
That’s what the president and the Politburo saw when they looked out the window at 2024.
They dismissed the ugly “right track/wrong track” polling numbers, noting how those had plummeted around the withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 and emphasized instead how the numbers had never changed dramatically from that point in time. It was a lame horse to which they hitched their wagon, but it was their argument: The polling numbers have always been weak; they’re not much worse now. They would circle back to this line of thinking after the debate in June.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 11)
As for White House staffers who had regular contact with the president, they seemed, at this point in his presidency, to split into three basic groups.
The Politburo made up the first group, its members having convinced themselves that the areas that caused people alarm were merely “performative” parts of the president’s job. The decisions being made behind closed doors were all that truly mattered, they told themselves. They dismissed or ignored those who raised concerns.
It was a theology that bordered on zealotry: In January 2025, Donilon continued to hold the viewpoint that while Biden might forget and mix up names, when the president decided what the proposal should be for a peace deal between Hamas and Israel, he was pretty damn smart.
Not everyone so blithely ignored the need for a president who could communicate effectively.
There was a second group of staffers who believed that the president’s decision-making was solid but also acknowledged that, yes, his communications were a problem. The president should be able to speak clearly and cohesively, off the cuff, to inspire confidence and convince others of the correctness of his views. Such “performative” parts of the job were neither superficial nor unimportant. They were, in this age, integral to presidential leadership. The second group took the concerns seriously.
There was also a third group: those who were concerned that the president was in serious decline. They were angry, feeling that the Politburo was doing the country and the president a deep disservice by pretending this wasn’t happening.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 11)
Noting previous cases of what is sometimes called “spillage,” especially with President Reagan and his diaries, Hur stated that “there is no record of the Department of Justice prosecuting a former president or vice president for mishandling classified documents from his own administration,” with the one exception being former President Trump. Hur stressed several serious distinctions between Trump’s case and Biden’s, most notably the fact that “after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite.”
However, Hur noted that when Biden was asked about his reaction to the image of the “top secret documents laid out on the floor at Mar-a-Lago,” Biden said it was “totally irresponsible” and could “compromise sources and methods.”
Biden’s “emphatic and unqualified conclusion that keeping marked classified documents unsecured in one’s home is ‘totally irresponsible’ because it ‘may compromise sources and methods’ applies equally to his own decision to keep his notebooks at home in unlocked and unauthorized containers,” Hur wrote.
The second point was that Hur had concluded “that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter.”
Points one and two would seem to be contradictory. The explanation could be found in point three: The prosecutors believed that a jury would see Biden “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Prosecutors make calculations all the time about whether they can get a conviction. Some witnesses seem uncredible. Some victims might seem heartless. And some criminals might seem so addled that they’re entirely sympathetic.
Painting a portrait of a man in decline, the report noted that Biden’s memory in the Zwonitzer tapes, in the spring of 2017, had “significant limitations.” Biden’s recorded conversations from that time were described
as “often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.”
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 11)
Hur noted these moments and explained that while he would have to prove at any potential trial that Biden kept these documents knowing he was breaking the law, he expected that the president’s attorneys “would emphasize these limitations in his recall.” The case just wasn’t winnable, Hur concluded. “While he is and must be accountable for his actions—he is, after all, the president of the United States—based on our direct observations of him, Mr. Biden is someone for whom many jurors will want to search for reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury they should convict him—by then a former president who will be at least well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 11)
Privately, in a February 5 letter to Hur from Bauer and Sauber, and then in a February 7 letter to Garland signed by Bauer and Siskel, Biden’s lawyers said parts of the draft report—which had not yet been released to the public—“violate Department of Justice policy and practice by pejoratively characterizing uncharged conduct.”
Primarily, Bauer and Siskel objected to the “multiple denigrating statements about President Biden’s memory,” which painted a picture of a president with “a failing memory in a general sense, an allegation that has no law enforcement purpose.” The “pejorative judgment” that Biden had poor powers of recollection was “uncalled for and unfounded.”
Many legal observers thought odd the decision by the two Biden lawyers to focus on the part of the report describing the president’s memory and not the part that compares Trump’s actions unfavorably with Biden’s, or the essential exculpatory nature of their conclusion.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 11)
Throughout the day on February 8, the White House discussed how to respond to the Hur report. Earlier on, they were leaning toward releasing a simple written statement. But that idea was upended when Biden’s family intervened.
Hunter and Val Biden were furious—at Biden’s team. By this point, Hunter had been clashing with Anita Dunn and Bob Bauer for years and was frustrated that his father was now in this position. Incensed by Hur’s assertion that his father couldn’t place the year of Beau’s death, Hunter argued for a more aggressive approach to prove the doubters wrong. He and the First Lady pushed for the president to fight back—in person.
The team chose the Diplomatic Reception Room, which meant that reporters would be close enough to Biden to shout questions. Top aides gathered in the Cabinet Room, which spoke to the gravity of the moment.
Just before 8:00 p.m., President Biden walked into the room. He leaned into the exoneration, yet then couldn’t help but reveal his anger about “some language in the report about my recollection of events. There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that. Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, It wasn’t any of their damn business.”
That, of course, was a complete misrepresentation of facts.
Hur had asked about the 2017–2018 period. He hadn’t mentioned Beau. Biden had mistakenly thought Beau was deployed or dying during that time.
Asked about being described as someone who might seem to a jury like a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Biden said, “I’m well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing. I’ve been president. I put this country back on its feet. I don’t need his recommendation.”
“How bad is your memory?” asked a reporter from Fox.
“My memory is so bad, I let you speak,” Biden snapped.
He denied being careless with classified material, saying that he took “responsibility for not having seen exactly what my staff was doing.” He denied sharing classified material with his ghostwriter despite the evidence that he had.
“Mr. President, for months when you were asked about your age, you would respond with the words ‘Watch me,’ ” CNN’s MJ Lee said.
“Watch me,” Biden repeated.
“Many American people have been watching, and they have expressed concerns about your age. They—”
“That is your judgment,” Biden said. “That is your judgment.”
“This is according to public polling,” Lee countered.
“That is not the judgment of the press,” Biden said, confusingly.
“They express concerns about your mental acuity,” Lee said. “They say that you are too old.”
Other reporters shouted out other questions. Asked to provide an update on negotiations to free the hostages seized by Hamas, Biden criticized the government of Israel, saying, “The conduct of the response in Gaza—in the Gaza Strip—has been over the top. I think that—as you know, initially, the president of Mexico, el-Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in. I talked to him. I convinced him to open the gate.”
El-Sisi is, of course, the president of Egypt, not Mexico.
The news conference ended after twelve minutes.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 11)
In March, to help drive a more sympathetic narrative, the White House gave embargoed copies of transcripts of Hur’s interviews to journalists whom they perceived as friendlier. Right before Hur was called to testify to Congress about his conclusions, Democrats released the transcripts more broadly, hoping that the awfulness of Biden’s answers would be subsumed by coverage of a partisan hearing at which Democrats hammered Hur for articulating the obvious about the president’s acuity and Republicans attacked him for failing to prosecute.
Most news media coverage thus did not acknowledge the president’s long, rambling answers; the troubling lapses of memory; and the disruptions in his thought process. Most did not point out that Biden’s accusation about Hur bringing up Beau’s death was false.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 11)
Biden’s team was offering some new explanations that were more politically palatable. On February 10, The New York Times reported that “multiple people close to the White House” explained that the president’s walk was “partly because of his refusal to wear an orthopedic boot after suffering a hairline fracture in his foot before taking office.”
This contradicted what O’Connor had said at the time. After Biden wore a walking boot for ten weeks in late 2020 and early 2021, O’Connor noted that “both small fractures of his foot are completely healed” and that “this injury has healed as expected.”
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 11)
By 2024, aides likened the president’s public appearances to holding a time bomb. Every time Biden was in front of the cameras, aides knew there was a chance that the bomb could go off.
But that night, as the president walked off the dais, he was swarmed by praiseful House Democrats.
“You were on fire!” said Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar.
“Nobody’s gonna talk about cognitive impairment now!” chimed in New York Congressman Jerry Nadler.
“I kinda wish sometimes I was cognitively impaired,” the president joked.
“Has anyone seen Sleepy Joe Biden?” wrote USA Today’s Rex Huppke. “I was told the current president is a dementia-addled fool incapable of completing a sentence, but there was a guy standing in his place giving Thursday night’s State of the Union who was fiery, direct, sensible and a far cry from sleepy.”
But in the scrum, Congressman Mike Quigley, who hadn’t been this close to Biden since they were in Dublin almost a year before, put his hand on the president’s back. He could feel his ribs, and his spine. It was like touching Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. The president’s voice was soft and breathy. His eyes were darting from side to side. It again disconcertingly reminded Quigley of his late father.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 11)
It was true that as president, Biden was less accessible, less able to talk to voters, less in his element of chatting with regular folks. The Secret Service was part of the reason why, but whatever the reason, Biden had drifted further and further away from his ability to be the great retail politician he was, Katzenberg explained.
Katzenberg saw Biden’s communications struggles and thought he could fix them. He even enlisted the help of his show-biz friend Steven Spielberg. They worked on lighting, and a better microphone to amplify his voice when he would oddly speak in barely a whisper. Biden didn’t always like getting notes on his delivery but would listen to someone like Spielberg. The famous director would also coach the president before speeches like the State of the Union. Katzenberg hoped that voters’ age concerns about Biden could be assuaged with a little Hollywood magic.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 11)
The campaign “assumed they would migrate back to Biden,” said one of the pollsters. “There was no data supporting this.”
“Even if we brought them all back, that wouldn’t be enough,” the pollster noted. “Because there would of course be new voters, and Trump generally did better with new voters.”
The pollsters knew why those 2020 Biden voters were holding back. They had the actual data. Not hunches. Not gut instincts.
Those 2020 Biden voters were holding back because they had concerns about two issues: Biden’s age and inflation.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 11)
Then there was that other major concern: From the very beginning, voters were saying that Biden was too old, whether in open-ended poll questions or focus groups—smaller interviews and discussions with voters —run by Binder.
Binder worked for the DNC and then as a consultant to the campaign, and from late 2023 through 2024, he conducted focus groups. There hadn’t been one where Biden’s age didn’t come up. Trump was only three and a half years younger, but voters just didn’t see him the same way. The pollsters would read about or hear of voters regularly denigrating Biden— doddering, incoherent, unable to complete sentences—in ways that the pollsters felt, in early spring, were unfair.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 11)
In an early May poll of Michigan voters, the pollsters asked a question: “What is your biggest concern about Joe Biden?”
Their second-most-important concern was inflation. Twenty-three percent were worried about that.
Their number one issue, by far, was that Joe Biden did not seem mentally fit enough to be president.
Thirty-eight percent of Michigan voters said that was their number one concern about Biden.
It wasn’t clear to the pollsters if any of their information was making its way to the president, but it was clear that the Politburo was hoping Biden could turn this around with a big moment: a debate.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 11)
Some on the campaign would argue that they had only a select set of tools for showing that the president was up to the job. They wouldn’t win unless they changed something. Which was why Biden, in the view of many on the campaign, had to debate. And the earlier the better. To put this age issue to rest.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 11)
A June debate also meant that if it wound up a disaster, the campaign would have time to recover.
The top aides who were able to acknowledge the president’s declining ability to communicate knew that this was a high-risk scenario. They’d seen the shift. It was happening rapidly. Biden would be dramatically worse in 2024 debate prep than in his State of the Union prep earlier that year.
“It’s true we were grading him on a curve every day,” a top aide admitted. “Things that would have been considered a disaster in 2023—by 2024, we would have said, ‘Okay, we got through that.’ ”
Donilon would assure colleagues: “He’s going to get elected again with people thinking he’s too old.” After all, he had done it once before.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 11)
The Journal interviewed more than forty-five people over several months, but the only ones who went on the record with their worries about Biden’s age were Republicans. The reporters wrote that regarding meetings with the president, “most of those who said Biden performed poorly were Republicans, but some Democrats said that he showed his age in several of the exchanges.”
The story was true. But the Biden team attacked the reporters for having relied on Republicans.
Ben LaBolt, the White House’s communications director, insinuated with zero evidence that the piece was ordered by Rupert Murdoch—the founder of The Journal’s parent company, News Corp, and the Fox Corporation, which owns Fox News—to help Trump win the election.
The story’s origins were actually much more mundane. After the Hur report came out, Washington Coverage Chief Damian Paletta and Washington Deputy Coverage Chief Janet Adamy called The Journal’s White House reporting team together to brainstorm ways to do more reporting on Biden’s age. No reporter was even assigned.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 12)
After Beau’s death, Hunter began having an affair with Beau’s widow, Hallie, hiding it from Kathleen, to whom he was still married. Hunter introduced Hallie to crack; she, too, became addicted. Hunter also had a relationship with a young stripper and designer whom he would have shop for his daughters, since they were around the same age.
After years of denying or sidestepping questions about it, Hunter now watched prosecutors bring out a laptop with a serial number matching his Apple account that had been left behind at a repair shop. The FBI had confiscated the MacBook and now witnesses confirmed the authenticity of much of the content on it.
Hunter’s ex-wife, Kathleen, told the jury she found a crack pipe at their home weeks after Beau’s death. Hunter confessed he was using it.
Prosecutors played hours of the self-narrated audiobook version of Hunter’s 2021 memoir, which they now framed as a partial confession to his drug use around the time he bought the gun. As his voice filled the courtroom, his sister Ashley—who had struggled with her own addiction— began to cry.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 13)
His supporters in the Democratic Party and in the media described the case as if it were merely about being late on his taxes, but it was much tawdrier than that, with Hunter at times earning money by cashing in on the family name and allegedly hiding this money from not only the government but also his ex-wife, to whom he owed alimony. He instead spent it “on drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes,” according to the indictment. One could only imagine the impact this would have on the already devastated president.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 13)
“It was not okay,” recalled the Hollywood VIP who had witnessed this moment. “That thing, the moment where you recognize someone you know —especially a famous person who’s doing a fucking fundraiser for you—it was delayed. It was uncomfortable.”
“George Clooney,” the aide clarified for the president.
“Oh, yeah!” Biden said. “Hi, George!”
Clooney was shaken to his core. The president hadn’t recognized him. A man he had known for years. Clooney had expressed concern about Biden’s health before—a White House aide had told him a few months before that they were working on getting the president to take longer steps when he walked—but obviously the problem went far beyond his gait. This was much graver.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 13)
When the event ended, the three men stood. Kimmel and Obama began to walk offstage, but Biden walked to the edge and stared blankly into the crowd. Obama walked back and grabbed Biden’s arm, then guided him backstage. He later explained that he just wanted to get the hell out of there, but he didn’t want to leave Biden alone up on the stage. Biden folks insisted that the president was just basking in the glow of a supportive audience, and they called clips of the very real moment “cheap fakes,” a term for video content that has been deceptively edited or taken out of its full context. But even some supporters present in the arena wondered what was going on.
He doesn’t look like he knows where he’s supposed to go, thought New Hampshire Democratic Congresswoman Annie Kuster, sitting in the audience with California Congresswoman Julia Brownley.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 13)
That same night, in New York City, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was at a wedding. He had jitters about the upcoming debate.
Sometimes the president would call him and forget why he’d called. Sometimes he rambled. Sometimes he forgot names. Schumer publicly insisted he wasn’t concerned about Biden’s acuity, but privately he conceded he was worried about the optics. Biden talked sluggishly—his voice was not just slower but oddly quieter, like that of Schumer’s mother, who had Parkinson’s. His gait was slower too. Schumer was concerned about the president’s electability.
He talked about it with his staff, but he felt that he had to keep a close circle. If he talked about his worries with Obama or Jeffries or Pelosi and it got out that they were discussing whether Biden was too old to run, that would make it even harder for him to win.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 13)
After the debate, much would be made about the number of audacious lies told by Trump, and rightly so. Trump falsely claimed he “had the greatest economy in the history of our country,” continued to mislead the public about undocumented migrants being sent to the US from South American asylums and prisons, and lied about January 6, describing it as “a relatively small number of people that went to the Capitol and in many cases were ushered in by the police.” But the notion that Biden had not had any troops die anywhere in the world was also jarringly false. Beyond the thirteen US servicemembers killed during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, three US servicemembers had been killed by Iranian-backed terrorists during a drone strike on a US outpost in Jordan in January. In a separate incident that same month, two Navy SEALS had died during a military operation in which they attempted to board an unflagged ship off the coast of Somalia.
The split screen of the debate didn’t benefit Biden, who looked pale and considerably older than his three-years-younger opponent, and whose slackjawed expressions and undetermined stare at the floor in front of him suggested that he wasn’t even aware he was on camera for the entire ninety minutes of the debate. Critics can sniff at the superficialities of such matters, but television is a visual medium, and voters make decisions based on a host of factors. Presidents from Kennedy to Reagan to Clinton to Obama to Trump have taken such communications issues seriously.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 14)
The transcript doesn’t do justice to his difficulty finding the words, his facial expression as he closed his eyes to root around for what he was trying to say.
“We’d be able to right—wipe out his debt,” Biden said. “We’d be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do”—this seemed a holding pattern clause as he grasped for the list of priorities—“childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to subtren-strengthen our health-care system”—his face betrayed a struggle here—“making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person, ay, ah, eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the, uh, with-with-with the COVID—excuse me—with, um… dealing with everything we have to do with…uh…” He made some guttural sounds. The moderators had iPads to communicate with the control room. Jake wrote: “Holy smokes.”
The president was really having trouble accessing the right words he needed to communicate, relying on placeholders such as “all those things we need to do” and “eligible for what I’ve been able to do with.”
“Look,” he said, making the guttural sounds again, “if…we finally beat Medicare,” he said.
Biden had reached his time limit, so Jake thanked him and threw it to Trump.
Dana wrote something down on a piece of paper and passed it to Jake: “He just lost the election.”
“Well, he’s right. He did beat Medicare,” Trump said, opting not to raise the issue of Biden’s difficulty communicating. “He beat it to death. And he’s destroying Medicare, because all of these people are coming in. They’re putting them on Medicare, they’re putting them on Social Security.”
This being the first presidential election since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with its Dobbs decision, Dana asked Trump whether American women could have access to abortion pills, used in about two-thirds of all abortions. Would he block abortion medication?
Trump falsely asserted that the “Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill. And I agree with their decision to have done that, and I will not block it.”
What had happened was that on June 13, the court unanimously ruled that plaintiffs suing to challenge the FDA’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone lacked legal standing to do so. The court did not rule on whether the FDA had the authority to approve the drug.
Trump falsely asserted that “everybody wanted” Roe v. Wade overturned so that states could make their own decisions about abortion rights. “Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives—everybody wanted it back,” Trump said.
This was a subject top of mind for millions of voters, one that had played a major role in the Democrats’ better-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterms, and one that the Trump campaign hated discussing, since the GOP’s underlying position—opposing legal abortion—was out of step with the majority of the country.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 14)
Then, for an inexplicable reason, Biden brought up one of his weakest policy areas—the border crisis and the American victims of violence committed by undocumented immigrants. “Look, there’s so many young women who have been—including a young woman who just was murdered, and he went to the funeral,” Biden said. “The idea that she was murdered by a, by a, by an immigrant coming in, and they talk about that.”
It was a cringe-inducing reference, at once tragic and bizarre, to the murder of Laken Riley.
“But here’s the deal,” Biden continued. “There’s a lot of young women who are being raped by their, by their in-laws, by their, by-by their spouses, brothers and sisters, by—just—it’s just, it’s just ridiculous. And they can do nothing about it. And they try to arrest them when they cross state lines.”
The horror of rape, the need for women and girls to be able to terminate pregnancies resulting from such acts of violence, was certainly one of the abortion rights movement’s strongest arguments. That young women were being raped by their sisters was not.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 14)
He struggled to find the right words and here came another horrible moment: “And I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on”—here he lost his train of thought again—“the-the-the-the total initiative relative to what we’re going to do with more border patrol and more asylum officers.”
He seemed to be grabbing words in his arsenal, but it was difficult to discern an articulation of an actual idea.
It was President Trump’s turn to respond.
“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump said. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
Biden turned to Trump, mouth agape, a painful moment of split screen.
It wasn’t even twenty-two minutes into the ninety-minute debate.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 14)
Biden’s two worst moments of the debate came up top, when viewership is traditionally highest.
Most of his performance was not as poor as those two moments. But as a matter of history, those were two of the worst moments—if not the absolute worst—for any major party candidate since televised American presidential debates began in 1960.
Yes, the viewpoint that policy matters more than style is perfectly legitimate, and yes, for those inclined to intensely dislike Trump on substantive and/or stylistic grounds, nothing in his performance was particularly convincing. He made an astounding number of exaggerations, told a historic number of lies.
On a general note, CNN executives had ruled that, consistent with sixtyfour years of presidential debate history up until that point, Trump’s lies would be for Biden to fact-check and dispute, as previous candidates had done with their rivals. (Ronald Reagan’s most famous debate line—“There you go again”—came from his attack on President Jimmy Carter for an assertion about Medicare that Reagan took issue with.)
Biden attempted to fact-check numerous times but was largely incapable of doing so in an understandable way. And beyond that was the larger point of the debate catastrophe as it was unfolding.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 14)
When it was over, the Bidens approached the table to say hello to the moderators. To Jake and Dana, it didn’t seem as if Biden had any idea how bad his performance was, though he did say, “Sorry about my voice; I have a cold.” He remarked on the wild claims Trump had made, then said he would go see what the commentators were saying. Jake didn’t know what to say and attempted to make small talk with the First Lady by showing her that he was wearing Phillies cuff links.
Senior Democrats who had done work for Biden in 2024 later told us that they had watched the debate and wondered: Just who the hell is running the country?
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 14)
Five minutes before going on CNN, Harris herself landed on the line she would use: Acknowledge the slow start but then point to the strong finish.
But CNN’s Anderson Cooper kept pushing Harris to go beyond that talking point.
Cooper noted that Harris had debated Biden in 2019 “and he was a very different person on the stage four years ago when—when you debated him. You must—I mean, that—that’s certainly true, is it not?”
In response to Cooper’s follow-ups, Harris responded with a line she hadn’t rehearsed beforehand.
“I got the point that you’re making about a one-and-a-half-hour debate tonight. I’m talking about three and a half years of performance in work that has been historic.” Many Biden aides cheered her defense.
After the interview, Harris was visibly angry with Cooper. He had been asking the questions the nation had been wondering, but she took it personally.
This motherfucker doesn’t treat me like the damn vice president of the United States, she said to colleagues. I thought we were better than that.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 15)
During and after the debate, friends and former colleagues of Robert Hur’s texted him.
OMG, one said.
VINDICATION, another wrote.
Finally, the American people were watching what Hur had seen the previous October—what he had been vilified for saying. His friends wondered if he felt relieved.
Hur told them that all he felt was sad. How could anyone look at Joe Biden at that debate and not feel bad?
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 15)
After the debate, at around 11:00 p.m., the president and the First Lady walked into a room at a debate watch party for a preplanned victory lap. With a DJ spinning tunes and silhouettes of aviators on the screens, the event was meant to show energy after a debate that had demonstrated the polar opposite.
The campaign staff had done an admirable job of keeping the crowd excited, shouting out “Four more years! Four more years!” as the Bidens entered the room. Jill walked ahead of her husband to the stage and immediately grabbed the microphone from the DJ so that she could speak first. With the campaign in crisis and her husband in deep trouble, she was putting her hands on the wheel.
“Joe, you did such a great job!” she said, sounding like a kindergarten teacher commending a student. “You answered every question! You knew all the facts!” she continued, piling on the infantile praise. (“This, to the guy who controls the nuclear codes,” quipped columnist Maureen Dowd, who had covered Biden for decades, and whom the family read religiously.)
“And let me ask the crowd: What did Trump do?” the First Lady said.
“Lieeeeeeee!” she yelled along with the crowd. She was just trying to help her husband, but even she later confessed that the moment looked terrible.
She was right that Trump had told more than his share of lies during the debate.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 15)
The fact that proudly progressive journalists on a proudly progressive network rooting for Biden were saying these things was unquestionably significant.
But Bidenland may as well have been on Mars.
“Look, folks,” the president told the adoring crowd after his wife handed him the microphone, “you know, there, uh—I shouldn’t say this, but my brother always uses lines from movies. There was a famous movie by John Wayne, and—and he’s working for the, uh, the Northern military, trying to get the Apaches back on the reservation, and they were lying like hell to him. And they’re all sitting on a bluff, and John Wayne was sitting with two Indian—they were, they were tr—Apaches. And one of them looked at John Wayne and said, ‘These guys are nothing but lying, dog-faced pony soldiers.’ ”
The crowd roared and laughed.
“Except, he’s just a liar,” Biden added.
No such line was ever said in any John Wayne movie. The fabricated quote—to attack Trump as a liar, no less—was a perfect encapsulation of the Biden campaign at that moment. However much Trump was a “lying, dog-faced pony soldier,” there was at that moment in American history no lie more widely discussed than the one that millions of Americans now realized they’d been told for months, if not years: the lie that Joe Biden was perfectly fine and up to the task of being president for four more years.
“One of the great lessons from 2024,” Plouffe would later tell us, is that “never again can we as a party suggest to people that what they’re seeing is not true.”
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 15)
After debates, each side sends dozens of surrogates to the spin room to try to convince reporters that their candidate won.
For the first twenty-five minutes after the debate, no Biden surrogates were in the room, as they were trying to figure out what to say. Meanwhile, Trump surrogates were everywhere.
Before the debate, the Biden team had decided that they were going to try to upend the spin-room model. Instead of spreading out across the room to give individual commentary, the surrogates would huddle together and essentially give a united press conference.
But after Biden’s performance and the unusual delay, that approach made the campaign look even more defensive. The surrogates gave statements and then took a handful of questions. After a historically terrible debate performance, they only stayed for about fifteen minutes.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 15)
Five minutes into the debate, the pollsters were on texts and Signal chains acknowledging the reality: This was a fucking disaster.
Top campaign staff had huddled during the first commercial break—the pollsters, per usual, were not included in any strategy sessions—and the inner circle was soon firing off this message: “From campaign aide: President had a cold but he warmed up as he went and really had some very tough lines against Trump. Ultimately, substance over style is what matters to voters on the issues that affect their lives. On Roe, immigration, economy, democracy—we got off key contrast we needed. Our dials show the President [sic]”—the intended word was voters—“hated Trump— particularly his Jan 6 answer. MUST be noted. Trump refused to accept results of elect 3x.”
This was an accurate description—David Binder’s focus group respondents, forced to watch the entire debate, had not liked Trump’s performance.
But there were two major caveats that Biden folks did not share when heralding the dials.
First, the group also disliked Biden’s performance quite a bit: Any confidence they had in his ability to be president was depleted. The overall tenor was one of disgust with both nominees. After the debate was done, when the focus group moderator conversed with the voters, some pressed their hands to the sides of their heads, despondent that in a country of three hundred forty million people, voters had to choose between these two men.
Second, the dials did not reflect a cross section of average voters. They consisted of sixty-one voters in Phoenix, mostly independents, almost three quarters of whom had not voted for Trump in 2020. Almost 60 percent of them had voted for Biden in 2020. These were the Biden voters he was failing to win back.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 15)
Emanuel noted that Biden’s “cohorts have told us that he’s healthy for over a year.” Pointedly, he added, “I had a father who died at ninety-two, but at eighty-one I took away his car.”
“I promised myself I wasn’t going to swear,” Emanuel said, struggling to contain himself. “We’re in a—this is a pickle…. If this is, as Biden says, the fight for our democracy…he gave us a bunch of malarkey and I’m really pissed. We all should be really pissed,” Emanuel continued. “I mean I cannot believe we’re in this situation.”
Finally, the famously profane Emanuel couldn’t hold it in any longer: “We’re in Fuck City.”
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 16)
The Democratic governors came to the White House by planes, trains, automobiles, and Zoom. The goal was to have a candid conversation with the president about what was going on in the different states and how they viewed the race. But any question about how open the president’s mind was evaporated as he crossed the threshold into the room where the governors sat waiting, Vice President Harris trailing behind him.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Biden said.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 16)
He began his refrain. The polls still say I am the best person to go up against Trump. The polls also say that people aren’t concerned with my health, that folks are much more concerned with saving democracy. The polls actually haven’t changed since the debate. Donald Trump should be way further ahead than he is. Tell me what I need to do to win.
Throughout the meeting, the president didn’t really respond to questions. He leaned on familiar Biden tropes: He beat this guy once, and he was going to beat him again.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 16)
In prerecorded interviews, President Biden appeared on a few radio shows with predominantly Black audiences. “I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice president, first Black woman, to serve with a Black president, proud of the first Black woman in the Supreme Court,” he told Philadelphia’s WURD. “There’s just so much that we can do because together we—there’s nothing. Look, this is the United States of America.”
Beyond the president saying he was proud to be the “first Black woman” in an interview designed to prove his abilities, the radio host later revealed that the Biden campaign had given her a list of eight questions to ask him. In the Biden campaign’s efforts to demonstrate to the world that the president was sharp as a tack, it felt the need to feed questions to the hosts for a prerecorded call-in radio segment with a sympathetic interviewer.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 16)
Governor Healey was distraught by how everything had gone down. She felt deflated and despondent about the state of democracy and government. This is what we work our asses off for, she thought, and it comes down to the decision of one person. People thought there was some big Democratic Party apparatus making moves, putting people in, setting things up. But it wasn’t a chessboard; it was just one old man and his enablers carrying out his every wish.
She issued a statement calling on Biden to “carefully evaluate whether he remains our best hope to defeat Donald Trump.”
She was on a Fourth of July vacation with her family and trying not to get too depressed about the decline of the country and the inevitable reelection of Trump.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 16)
“If he wants to come to my district,” Wild said, “and he needs to come to my district—it’s the third-largest region in Pennsylvania; it’s the biggest swing district and the fastest-growing—he needs to come here. But I have to tell you, I’m not going to be able to show up with him. I cannot campaign with Joe Biden. If I defend the president, I lose my integrity. How do we go after Trump for lying if people see us as liars?”
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 16)
Harris was trying to keep her head down. Her team didn’t want to do anything that would rouse suspicion from Biden, his team, or other Democrats that she was trying to overthrow her boss. She felt it important to be seen as and to be loyal. That quiet posture created its own tensions with the Biden team, however. The Biden campaign had asked her to call members of Congress to help scare up support. Harris said she would call members she had long-standing relationships with but not people she barely knew. All it would take was one congressman misinterpreting Harris’s call as an underhanded maneuver to poach support for herself, they argued. Harris dialing up a bunch of members could make the situation much worse. It was playing with fire.
Some on Biden’s team fumed about Harris turning down a request at a time of crisis.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 16)
In his home office in the South of France, Clooney sat down at his laptop.
“I love Joe Biden,” Clooney wrote. “As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals. In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced.”
But, Clooney added, “the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
Clooney got down to the point: “We are not going to win in November with this president…. This is the opinion of every senator and Congress member and governor who I’ve spoken with in private. Every single one, irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly.”
He wanted some sort of process for a new nominee. “Let’s hear from Wes Moore and Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom and Andy Beshear and J.B. Pritzker and others. Let’s agree that the candidates not attack one another but, in the short time we have, focus on what will make this country soar. Then we could go into the Democratic convention next month and figure it out.”
And then he attempted to end the op-ed with a note that was both empathetic and firm: “Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024.”
Clooney sent a copy to Jeffrey Katzenberg and told him to show Steve Ricchetti.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 16)
Katzenberg had been making huge efforts to boost Biden’s performative abilities. Spielberg had helped with debate prep. Aides had credited the director’s involvement with a significant improvement in Biden’s performance in ads and videos. Biden hated doing video recordings and would snap at aides who asked him to try them again. But he was willing to take direction from the Academy Award–winning director of Saving Private Ryan in a way he never would from a campaign aide or ad maker. Multiple takes. It really helped—though not enough.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 16)
Donilon presented to them the president’s theory of the case: Getting rid of the president at the top of the ticket would be a mistake. He had won eighty-one million votes in 2020, more than anyone in history, and ran better with seniors and male voters than most Democrats. The problems they were facing were with voters who would likely come home to the Democrats.
Moreover, walking away from a completely known incumbent president would be a big mistake, giving the nomination to someone far less known. Basically, the race was between two incumbent presidents; if Biden got out, those seeking a comfort level would shift to Trump.
Donilon also made the case that the polling remained competitive— within the margin of error, or just outside it. They were down maybe three points nationally, five points in battlegrounds. If they looked back in history, polls in the summer were hardly predictive.
Washington’s Patty Murray, the president pro tempore of the Senate, spoke first. She spoke of Biden’s legacy, suggesting that he was ruining it. She didn’t explicitly call for him to drop out, but she certainly implied it.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 16)
“They’re not telling you,” Schumer said of Donilon and Ricchetti. “The pollsters told me, ‘He’s not seen our polls. It all goes to Donilon, and Donilon interprets it.’ Okay? You have a five percent chance. The analytics guy who probably knows this best said it’s one percent.”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t run,” Schumer said. “I’m urging you not to run.”
“Do you think Kamala can win?” Biden asked.
“I don’t know if she can win,” Schumer said. “I just know that you cannot.”
Biden said that he needed a week.
They stood. On their way out, Biden put his hands on Schumer’s shoulders. “You have bigger balls than anyone I’ve ever met,” Biden told him.
On his drive back to Brooklyn, Schumer called his staff and teared up while relaying their conversation. But soon the subject changed. At 6:11 p.m., at a campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump was nearly assassinated. One audience member was killed, two others were seriously wounded, and the gunman was shot dead by Secret Service countersnipers. The image of Trump bloodied but standing defiant, fist in the air, after a bullet grazed his ear would be one of the most memorable of the year.
Looking at that photo, Biden campaign aides couldn’t help but think of how this would help Trump politically. “Fuck!” more than a few said.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 16)
Biden continued to push as if the news media hadn’t spent much of the previous eight years fact-checking Donald Trump.
“Seriously, you won’t answer the question,” Biden said, “but why doesn’t the press talk about all the lies he told?”
“We have reported many of the issues that came of that debate,” Holt countered.
“No, you haven’t,” Biden said.
“Well, we’ll provide you with them,” Holt said.
“God love you,” the president said.
It was the news media’s fault for not sufficiently covering Trump’s lies, it was the Progressive Caucus’s fault for not going after oligarchs enough, it was the New Dems’ fault for not talking up his achievements enough. It was everybody else’s fault.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 16)
The White House had invited South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn to fly with the president on Monday to Las Vegas, where both men would attend the NAACP National Convention the next day. During the plane ride, the congressman noticed that the conversations taking place on board didn’t have much to do with politics or the campaign or the dire reality of the president’s situation. White House staff seemed more focused on policy and legacy issues.
Clyburn’s sixth sense went off. He’s going to drop out.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 16)
Harris called her pastor, Amos Brown. She called Obama, who said he didn’t want to put his finger on the scale, given the possibility of others running. He thought it important that this not look like a coronation. Obama hadn’t endorsed during the primaries in 2016 or in 2020 either, wanting to remain neutral in case the party needed a unifying statesman at the end of a divisive contest. Obama also thought Harris would look stronger if there were some sort of process from which she emerged.
“Please call me,” he told her. “I want to give you advice and counsel. I’m here.”
Obama’s statement went out at 3:44 p.m. He praised Biden and said he had “extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.” He didn’t mention Harris.
Some on the Harris team were annoyed, but they remembered that the only endorsement she really needed was that of the guy to whom thousands of Democratic delegates had pledged—Joe Biden. And he had already given it to her.
Harris raised the prospect that they call the other Democrats who might at that moment be contemplating running themselves. Phone each one, tell them she was running, tell them she intended to earn the nomination, and say she’d love to have their support. Put them on the spot.
They started with one of the most ambitious among the lot—the young governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro. For whatever reason, he was the one they viewed as most likely to throw his hat into the ring. But Shapiro was immediately on board. She called California Governor Gavin Newsom but didn’t reach him. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was nice but demurred when it came to an endorsement; she needed a moment to digest it all.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 16)
From the beginning of her campaign in July to the August weeks of picking a running mate, presiding over the convention, rolling out wave after wave of ads, and on through September debate prep, it was clear that Biden was a liability. And it was never clear to the campaign what she could do, or was willing to do, about it.
Top strategists would discuss it with her, but beyond Harris’s loyalty to Biden, there were questions about what she could say to appeal to those upfor-grab voters—Never Trump Republicans, independents, disaffected Democrats—without alienating the essential Democratic base.
She talked it all over with her top strategists, gaming it all out.
First off, the issue that she truly and most strongly disagreed with the president on behind closed doors was Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. And that was too politically fraught to bring to the fore.
Should she have said that the Biden-Harris administration handled the post-pandemic stimulus wrong, pumping too much money into the economy and exacerbating inflation? That would have prompted a rash of questions about why she hadn’t said anything at the time. It was a no-win.
As would have been an admission that the administration should have firmed up security at the border, an issue where she had some purchase, having been given the portfolio of pushing officials in Central American countries to do more to address the root causes of immigration. The next logical question would be: Okay, at which meetings did you urge Secretary Mayorkas to send more agents? Nope.
Could she have said that Biden never should have run for reelection? It was obvious that was the reality of the Democratic Party’s circumstances, but what would it get her to say this now, especially given that she had vouched for his mental fitness after Hur’s report dropped? It would make her look hypocritical, and it would alienate the president and his die-hard supporters.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 17)
The campaign was trying to introduce her to the nation as a breath of fresh air, not a backstabber negotiating a minefield of gender and racial politics that the campaign couldn’t even fathom.
Harris was truly appreciative of the opportunity Biden had given her. Moreover, she had a close personal relationship with, and great affection for, Joe.
No, she wouldn’t do that.
On October 8, Harris went on The View.
“What do you think would be the biggest specific difference between your presidency and a Biden presidency?” Sunny Hostin asked.
“Well, we’re obviously two different people,” Harris said, “and I will bring those sensibilities to how I lead.” She started talking about home health care, violence against women and children, small businesses.
“Well, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” Hostin followed up.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris said, in perhaps the worst moment of her short campaign.
Most of the public thought that the country was on the wrong track, and she was presenting herself quite literally as “more of the same.” She tried to recover, but it was too late: She’d just provided new footage for a brandnew Trump TV ad.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 17)
Biden took the trump 2024 cap, and someone in the crowd said, “Put it on!” Biden shot back, “I ain’t going that far.” But then he plopped it on his head, right atop the Station 627 hat.
The crowd clapped and the image of Biden wearing a trump 2024 baseball cap went viral instantly.
“Thanks for the support, Joe!” wrote the Trump campaign on social media, with a photograph of Harris’s boss wearing a hat that honored Harris’s opponent. It was unimaginable that Harris would ever have done such a thing.
“What is he doing?” Harris asked her team. “This is completely unhelpful. And so unnecessary.”
That would be, the Harris campaign decided, the last time she would do a public event with the president before the election.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 17)
Leaning on staffers in the transcript office, as they had been doing all year, the White House Communications Office—not without some internal pushback—insisted that a possessive apostrophe was needed to understand what the president had said. The only garbage he saw was “his supporter’s,” the White House said. Hinchcliffe.
It was preposterous.
That evening, Trump cited the new controversy while speaking in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “That’s terrible,” Trump said. “Remember Hillary? She said ‘deplorable.’ And then she said ‘irredeemable,’ right?… That didn’t work out. ‘Garbage’ I think is worse, right?” The next day, he appeared in a Trump-branded garbage truck in Wisconsin, donning an orange-and-yellow safety vest. “This is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden,” he told reporters with satisfaction.
“What are we going to do about this?” Harris asked her team. Biden had stepped all over her speech and saved Trump from a spiraling news cycle.
By the end of the campaign, she had helped the Democratic Party but her own candidacy was barely treading water. And the albatross that was Joe Biden kept getting heavier.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 17)
As the Biden presidency came to its close, the president continued to work, but it was clear he was resentful. On January 5, after signing labor union–backed legislation to expand the Social Security benefits of large numbers of teachers, firefighters, and other groups, Biden responded to a reporter’s question about his age, saying, “My being the oldest president, I know more world leaders than any one of you ever met in your whole goddamn life!”
It was that kind of final chapter—a moment of accomplishment marred by a lashing out. Or by a reminder of Hunter Biden sleaze. A month earlier, on December 1, despite repeated public promises that he wouldn’t, the president gave his son Hunter a full and unconditional pardon—not only for his tax and gun convictions but also for any crime he committed over an eleven-year period, from January 1, 2014, to December 1, 2024.
It came after the annual Biden family Thanksgiving retreat to Nantucket. On the Saturday of that weekend, Hunter’s lawyer Abbe Lowell released a fifty-two-page report titled “The Political Prosecutions of Hunter Biden.” In that report, Lowell falsely asserted that “Garland kept Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney David Weiss in place as U.S. Attorney specifically because there was an open investigation of Hunter in that office.”
That was false. Garland wasn’t confirmed as attorney general until March 10, 2021; the decision to keep Weiss on the job was President Biden’s. Some at the DOJ wondered if Biden even remembered that he’d been the one who made that call.
“There is no disputing that Trump has said his enemies list includes Hunter,” Lowell wrote. “With the election now decided, the threat against Hunter is real.”
Biden’s aides understood the fatherly impulse behind the pardon. The timing was not politically ideal, but they also understood why Biden didn’t want his son to go through sentencing hearings in December.
What angered some Biden staffers, though, was that the president’s explanation for the pardon echoed Trump’s claims about political prosecutions. “The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Biden said, adding that “raw politics has infected this process, and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 18)
In its last few minutes, the Biden administration revealed that Biden had preemptively pardoned his brothers, Jimmy and Frank; his sister, Valerie Biden Owens; and two of their spouses. He said he’d done it not because they had committed any crimes but because he feared that Trump would weaponize the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies. Jimmy Biden’s business activities, however, had come under investigative scrutiny.
To many Democrats, this was another ignominious act by a president who repeatedly put the interests of his family ahead of those of his party and the country.
Hours later—despite Trump advisers claiming that the new president was going to engage in a careful review process and consider clemency for January 6ers on a case-by-case basis—Trump went and offered a “full, complete and unconditional pardon” to approximately 1,250 people who had committed January 6–related crimes. Most of them had pleaded guilty, many had assaulted law enforcement.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 18)
Few of Biden’s critics within these pages, even those who only spoke to us on background or anonymously, would assert that the president was always unable to discharge his duties. And it is possible that many of his supporters genuinely believed that he was fit to run again. In an exchange with Donilon after the completion of the book he told us that he believed, then and now, that Biden was not only fully capable but would make the best president, that his experience and judgment were better than anyone’s, and that the concerns about his age paled in comparison to the threat Donald Trump posed to America. It seems eminently likely that Ricchetti and other senior Biden aides felt the same; that they were lying to themselves more than knowingly deceiving the American public. The truth is more complicated than Biden consistently being unable to function as president. He had moments of incoherence, of a stark inability to communicate or recognize people or recall important facts. Yet those same critics continued to the end to attest to his ability to make sound decisions, if on his own schedule. There’s no way that description reflects optimal presidential capacity, but the Constitution isn’t necessarily about optimal requirements. It’s about minimum requirements. The US Constitution does not require politicians to be self-aware, or brave, or selfless.
(Tapper and Thompson 2025, Ch. 18)
References
Tapper, Jake, and Alex Thompson. 2025. Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. N.p.: Penguin Publishing Group.
ISBN 9798217060672
Benjamin’s Book Journal 
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